Expert: Jesse Martinez - 4/5/2010

Question
QUESTION: Is there any hard evidence that the earth moves round the sun and not the sun goes round the earth have we video or instrumental readings? rather than mathematics?

ANSWER: Hi Rob. Yes there is. I will get back to this later - do not place trust in video evidence. It is easily faked. For instrumental evidence, count the human eye. If you accept hard evidence as being personal experience, research and observation, then I have it.

The solar system is Heliocentric. The Sun is at the center. Most of the disproved alternate theories have the Earth as the center of the solar system, where the Sun orbits the Earth.

If I ever doubted the accepted scientific definition of the Heliocentric Solar System with the sun being the center and the planets revolving around the sun and the moons of a planet circling the planets, I would have been convinced of this truth by an exercise I did in the mid 1980's.

The proof was my visual observation of the moons of Jupiter. It was a long but worthwhile experiment. I found and plotted the motions of the four largest moons of Jupiter to see if I could reconcile the data with known information.

I was playing "Galileo" in order to see if I could get the feeling of being a discoverer. [Galileo was the original discoverer of the four big moons of Jupiter]. This is proof by way of observation. I took no pictures, but I did sketch everything. I was able to determine orbital periods, elongation dates and many other things about the four moons. I could find no way to explain this except to accept the fact that the solar system is as described in modern day, Sun centered, Heliocentric.

Here you have a person that has actually proved to himself that the Earth revolves around the sun. In this Jupiter moon study mentioned above, there were several times that the moons circling Jupiter would enter and exit from the planet's shadow as they orbited around the far side.

The times of the occurrences matched predicted timings. They coincided with the accepted view of Copernicus' layout of the solar system, with the sun being at the center of gravity, and the Earth and Jupiter circling the sun and the four moons of Jupiter circling that planet.

All this data observed also pointed to the fact that the Earth and Jupiter circled the Sun in specific time periods at predictable distances.

The proof was indeed mathematical, based on visual observation. But that is better proof (IMO) than video or photos because of faking or fudging, which is way too easy to do with videos. I would never accept video as evidence of anything unless I had complete faith and confidence in the person that showed me.

Google the word "epicycles" to see unbelievable explanations for a geocentric solar system by inventing ridiculous and sometimes overly complex models to explain the motion of the other solar system components in order to keep the Earth at the center.


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QUESTION: thank you for a very full answer and im sure what u said proves it but im not clever enough to know......is there any reason we haven't got any imagery/video from probe launched "north" looking down on the plane of the solar system to proves this once n for all ?

ANSWER: Here is the thing with that scenario: It proves nothing. If a camera was placed directly above the north pole of the Earth and could stay there with the sun in the same field of view, it would look like the sun revolves around the Earth over the course of a year, giving a deliberate false conclusion. Once again, you would have to trust that what you are being shown is what it really is. Visual proof in this manner would not be convincing. Imagine yourself in outer space looking down at the Sun and Earth from many millions of miles away. At the speed at which these objects move, you would not be able to convince yourself that one is orbiting the other. They move too slowly with respect to each other. I wouldn't trust myself on this. The way I did it was similar. However, I was assured I was observing from the same place every night.

The actual truth is, if you could really get a good view and videotaped a whole year from a distant place that you could be sure was not moving in relation to the position of the sun at the time you started recording the motions of the two bodies, Earth and Sun, and you had fixed reference points in the far distance that could verify which one was actually moving around the other, you would see that the the two bodies revolve around a point that is inside the Sun, but not the center of the Sun. It is called the barycenter. Any two objects in space that interact gravitationally do so around a barycenter. So it is best to trust that indeed the Earth revolves around the Sun more than the Sun revolves around the Earth. See this site for more clarification.

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/barycntr.shtml



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: YOU HAVE BEEN SO VERY HELPFUL YOUR GONNA GET A TRIPLE A RATING THX SO MUCH

ONE FINAL QUESTION IF YOUR FED UP WITH ME DONT ANSWER ITS OK

IS THIER ANY PROOF THE EARTH IS EVEN MOVING I DONT MEAN ROTATING....LIKE AT 67000 MPH THROUGH SPACE ?

Answer
The Earth is believed to be moving through space at that speed, but here is one time you can choose your own answer. It is relative as Einstein would say. You can choose to say the Earth is just revolving around the Sun and the rest of the universe is moving by us at thousands of miles an hour, or that the Earth and Sun are hurtling though space at thousands of miles per hour relative to a certain point. It is your choice, and all the math works out in either scenario if you are consistent.